Building a wall-mounted wine-glass rack #2: Two prototypes serve as a design roadmap

In the last post I talked about why we needed a new wine-glass rack. I also discussed many of the questions I had about the design and joinery. Building two prototypes helped me answer all these questions.

I was able to experiment with slat rabbet depths and spacing to determine the optimal specifications. Moreover, I was able to try out various joinery options to flesh out the best way to put the rack together.

The prototypes also provided fertile ground to experiment on finishing details. For example, I tried side beads on the original full slats, but abandoned that because I thought it didn’t look good.

In the end, I just beaded the face of the half-slats that fit against the shelf brackets. I like that solution a lot because it breaks up the blockiness of the slats without going berserk with the beading plane.

To pick up the wine theme, I tried staining the wood with merlot (item 2 above)…but abandoned that as too hokey. Or more accurately, my lady frowned when I showed it to her.

Item 3 above shows Prototype No. 1’s 45 degree slat angle. My tests with glasses felt ok, but to be honest, the length of the cut was too long to use the router table. And planing down the 45 degree slat edges was laborious beyond belief.

I also beaded the top of the shelf support rail to hide a slight gap as well as break up the monolithicness of the merged seams.

Still more details begged for attention.

Since the winerack will sit over the buffet, I scanned it for details that I could mirror in the rack. The buffet’s top edge was half-rounded over from the underside.

In retrospect, I should have rounded the bottom lip of the front edge of the rack shelf. But it was all assembled before the thought occurred to me. Instead, I did a half round over of the insides of the outermost shelf brackets. And I did a full roundover of the center shelf brackets.

On the original prototype, I experimented by covering the shelf bracket edge with wine corks cut in half. This looked ok I thought but my lady nixed the idea. No matter, Prototype No 1 got chucked in the scrap pile.

And there my project languished for a few months, as I noodled over various details.

When the going gets tough, the tough go to San AntonioMy first clue was that I was hyperventilating. That’s what happens when you stick a claustrophobic guy in the window seat in the last row of one of those Smart-Car-sized jets bound for Southern Texas. Fortunately, a guy traded me for an aisle seat. So after finishing some work, I pulled out my coffee-stained hand-drawn rack plans and doodled out all the dimensions. Anything to prevent my mind from thinking about how small the air was in the cabin.

The plan was the basis of Prototype No. 2.

It was here I settled on joinery details.

After a few more tweaks to the plans (for example, I shortened the length of the rack because shorter boards were more affordable), I developed a cut list.

Mauricio, I think I paid like $21.00 for my 3/8” side-bead plane on ebay. It took some tuning and I had to repair some loose boxing but it’s performed like a champ since then. And it’s a lot of fun to use.